Motivation for Protecting Selfish Vehicles´ Location Privacy in Vehicular Networks

Location privacy is an important issue in vehicular networks since knowledge of a vehicle´s location can result in leakage of sensitive information. A way to protect vehicles´ location privacy is to have them change their pseudonyms in predetermined regions known as mix zones. However, selfish vehicles may not change their pseudonyms because of limited resources (such as pseudonyms and bandwidth). This could jeopardize the location privacy of those vehicles that are in need of changing their pseudonyms. To encourage vehicles to cooperate in changing their pseudonyms, we propose a method called Motivation for Protecting Selfish Vehicles´ Location Privacy (MPSVLP). In MPSVLP, vehicles can form a mix zone dynamically when their pseudonyms are close to expiration and can also earn reputation “credit” by implementing a pseudonym change. The simulations show that MPSVLP motivates more selfish vehicles to cooperate with each other while maintaining a high level of location privacy. In addition, MPSVLP can reduce communication overhead in comparison with the existing methods.